by Luisa Beck and Catherine D’Ignazio, with suggestions from the Participatory News class

“What is it we want our maps to be now, if no longer a single authoritative view or the world?” 
- Brooke Gladstone, Host of NPR’s On the Media

 Boston Marathon Bombings, April 15, 2013                Lushan Earthquake, April 20, 2013  

                               (Credit: AFP/Getty Images, National Geographic)

A Critical Geography of the News Coverage of the Boston Marathon Bombings

By Catherine D'Ignazio and Luisa Beck

VizThink by Willow Brugh

Artist and designer Lize Mogel came to the Center for Civic Media to discuss "Counter-cartography" a practice that uses maps and mapping to challenge the mainstream narrative of a site or history, from a political or activist perspective.

The Boston Globe's 68 blocks series is a unique experiment in embedded local journalism.

In 2012, the Boston Globe undertook a year-long effort to understand the Bowdoin-Geneva neighborhood of Dorchester. For decades, journalists had been reporting shootings and homicides there -- rushing to crime scenes and then leaving to file an article on time. The Globe wanted to tell a more complete story of the neighborhood.

From SmarterChild to the Low Orbit Ion Cannon to Horse_ebooks, humans have relationships of varying quality with bots. Mostly it’s commercial spam. But sometimes it’s less benign: for instance, the 2012 Mexican elections saw thousands of Twitter bots published by one candidate’s side denouncing the opposition with a flood of messages. There are countless examples of bots used for nefarious purposes, in America, Iran and elsewhere. What would a future look like where instead we see a proliferation of bots for positive civic engagement? Could we automate the distribution of civic information and education? Manipulate information flows to improve our welfare? Engineer reverse-Distributed-Denial-of-Service attacks? Should we? This panel takes a critical look at the discourse around, and architecture of, information overload to facilitate an important and timely debate around the engineering, usefulness, and ethics of bots for civic engagement.

The panel introduces themselves with an icebreaker question posed by Erhardt Graeff: "What is your favorite civic bot and why?"

On Friday, February 22nd, 2013, the White House held its first ever hackathon. Twenty-one coders, data scientists, and user experience designers from around the country joined seven members of the White House’s development team to work on the first We the People API. I had the great privilege of participating in this event. (Dude! I went to the White House to hack! Ok, back to journalist voice).

Last fall the Center for Civic Media launched a new partnership with the Boston Globe, the preeminent newspaper in the Boston and New England region. Part of this partnership means that we get access to the last year or so of their archives via their alpha API. And one of the first things we noticed about the API data is that Boston Globe reporters have to enter a location for their news story.

At the Center, we think that media attention matters - in both quantity and quality. This geodata provided a perfect entry to studying how media attention from the Boston Globe plays out spatially across Boston neighborhoods and Massachusetts towns. And with access to the text of the articles associated with different places, we could start to answer some questions about not just the amount of media attention a place receives but how that attention is framed.

Carlo Ratti, Director of the Senseable City Lab introduces the conference. This is the annual Senseable Cities conference run in partnership with the Economist magazine.

During the Urban Code conference, panelists and attendees will address how big urban data is impacting cities, urban systems and urban communities. You can monitor the twitter conversation at #urbancode.

Tonight's opening panel "On Topic" there will be five speakers. Each will do a 5-minute pecha kucha-style presentation and then we'll break for more in-depth conversation. The panelists in speaking order are:

Nitin Sawhney is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab and taught in the Art, Culture Technology program at MIT. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the New School in New York City, and a research affiliate with the Center for Civic Media.

Nitin starts by showing some photos of lower east Manhattan where he currently lives. The hurricane has severely affected his area and travel in that area remains slow.